In Darkness let Me Dwell Matinée concert (Programme 2009)

Seven sets by John Dowland (1563 – 1626)
Hille Perl, Dorothee Mields, Lee Santana und die Sirius Viols

with: Dorothee Mields song
Hille Perl viola da gamba
Lee Santana lute
and the Sirius Viols:
Frauke Hess, Juliane Laake, Sarah Perl,
Niklas Truchstedt

2 hrs, including the interval

price category: A

This superb concert, which has just appeared on CD with Sony, has a second title: “The Seven Shades of Melancholy“. It offers a unique opportunity to immerse oneself in the darker side of Elisabethan England. The brevity of people's lives, the rapid fading of beauty, the limits of medical knowledge, the difficult living conditions of the day – all this led to the Elisabethans seeing life not as one of gain but as one of loss, a brief valley of tears between birth and death. John Dowland is one of the most renowned exponents of this “Vanitas“ theory, mocked in later centuries with “ semper Dowland semper dolens“. And yet it is a music full of longing and beauty, and Hille Perl, one of the leading viola da gamba players of our time, together with her ensemble Sirius Viols and singer Dorothee Mields, make this concert a unique and exquisite experience of Dowland's music, a music which, in its turn, offers a deeper understanding of Shakespeare's ironic reperesentation of melancholy in the figures of the Duke Orsino and the doleful Jaques in the Forest of Arden.

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